A new documentary reveals the frightening power held by all the companies that you access online every day:
Terms And Conditions May Apply examines the cost of so-called 'free' services and the continuing disappearance of online privacy. People may think they know what they give up when they click 'I Agree' on companies like Facebook and Google. They're wrong.
See also the Guardian's guide to the metadata you generate online, and an example of how it was used by the FBI in the Petraeus scandal. (Hint: using an anonymous email account won't hide your identity.)
Update: On the other hand, you shouldn't stop worrying about the feds, either. Al Gore declared that the NSA's collection of vast amounts of data is "not really the American way" in a telephone interview published in the Guardian today:
Unlike other leading Democrats and his former allies, Gore said he was not persuaded by the argument that the NSA surveillance had operated within the boundaries of the law.
"This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment – and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear," he said. "It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is."
Gore added: "This is not right." . . .
Gore has long had qualms about the expansion of the surveillance state in the digital age. He made those concerns public this year in his latest book, The Future: Six Drivers of Social Change, in which he warned: "Surveillance technologies now available – including the monitoring of virtually all digital information – have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place."
Within hours of the Guardian's first story about the NSA, the former vice-president tweeted: "In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?
He said on Friday: "Some of us thought that it was probably going on, but what we have learned since then makes it a cause for deep concern."
Also: Representative Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, which has oversight of the Homeland Security Department, said after a briefing by intelligence officials that the revelations of NSA surveillance leaked to the media this past week are "just the tip of the iceberg," the program being much broader than hitherto suspected.
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. . . . I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. . . . I don't see myself as a hero, because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. --Edward Snowden
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. --Fourth Amendment, United States Constitution
An interview filmed a couple of days ago with the 29-year-old whistleblower who spilled the beans to the Guardianand the Washington Post about the National Security Agency's vast data-mining operations, thereby rocking the United States Government to its core:
Snowden was in Hong Kong when the interview was filmed, and quickly running out of funds. As of Sunday evening, Texas time, he had checked out of his hotel room, and the press says his whereabouts are "unknown."
He strikes your Head Trucker as a sensible, conscientious person, not a bug-eyed radical; and while he may or may not have been mistaken in his conclusions, my gut tells me his motives were good, and selfless, and for that I think he deserves our attention and respect. Of course, his days at liberty are likely to be numbered - if he is still alive, and not already kidnapped and flung into a hellhole "black prison" somewhere. But he seems to have known the enormous risks he was taking, and took them anyway. God help him.
Rachel further explores the limits of secrecy and freedom with the latest on the unfolding PRISM scandal, including a talk with one of the prime investigative journalists who broke the story - about 20 minutes of stuff here, but well worth your time:
Showtime! Pay no attention to those little men behind the curtains . . .
In the wake of the Verizon phone-trawling revelations, coming hot on the heels of other privacy and civil-liberties scandals in recent weeks, the New York Times today said in a scathing editorial that Obama "has now lost all credibility." Do you agree?
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive—whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. . . .
Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance—with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power—fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.
My question is, Who says the feds aren't also listening to every call, with some kind of futuristic, top-secret, voice-recognition software?
But if the Verizon revelation doesn't make you jump out of your socks, maybe this will, as reported by Amy Davidson today in the New Yorker - emphasis mine:
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”
These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”
This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that the order went well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.
The N.S.A.-briefing slides mix corporate cheer and disturbing revelations. There are the logos of the nine companies involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. That is the order in which they joined PRISM. The Post describes Apple as a holdout (it acquiesced, coincidentally or not, after Steve Jobs’s death).
In other words, boys: Everything you've ever done online in the last six years or so is recorded and stored in a government database. Everything. Just stop and sit with that thought awhile.
I don't know about you fellas, but one reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was to prune the rot from the governmental tree that Dubya and Co. introduced, and to try to preserve constitutional government in this country.
Now it appears I was misinformed. Somebody, please tell me it's not so.
Update, 9:45 p.m.: The Guardian reports that chiefs of the Silicon Valley companies named as collaborators in the PRISM program are shocked, shocked! that gambling is going on in this establishment to hear this story and deny they have any connection with it. Of course.
Round up the usual suspects.
Update, 6/7/13, 11:40 p.m.: Via Daily Kos, Rick Perlstein in The Nation reports that our government has been massively spying on its citizens by the millions since the 1930's - receiving daily bulk data from telephone and telegraph companies in the pre-internet days - as was revealed in the Abzug/Church congressional hearings in 1975, something your Head Trucker doesn't remember hearing about back then. But then, Perlstein says the mainstream media downplayed the story and buried it in the back pages.
Your Tax Dollars at Work.
Rachel reports on a story that originally broke in 2006, but nobody paid much attention: "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room" - and has more on this week's stories.
But not to worry. The Prez says, "Chill, people. Nobody is listening to your damn phone calls."
Anyway, it's all cool because all of your elected Congresspeeps, Democrat and Republican alike, have known all about this shit since like Day 1. So chillax already! And once again, pay no attention to what's going on over there with that funny little man behind the curtains. And call off your damn dog too.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
